Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Of interest: A review of "Coal Mountain Elementary"

In Coal Mountain Elementary, facts are restated in response to an implied question which might go something like this: What kind of poem would you make out of the lives and deaths of coal miners throughout the world? As a composite of verbatim news reports, testimonies, and curricula, Coal Mountain Elementary is a matter of record: Mark Nowak did not “write” this book any more than Langston Hughes “wrote” a poem on the Johannesburg mines. But who “wrote” Coal Mountain Elementary is less interesting to me than what Nowak reveals about how we define authorship, and what we call Coal Mountain Elementary (poetry; not poetry; found poetry; documentary poetry; investigative poetry; working class poetry; labor poetry) is less interesting to me than what the book reveals about our expectations for poetry.

via jacket2.org

Of interest: Biggers interviews Blanton

Hailed as a cross between Erin Brockovich and the legendary Aunt Molly Jackson, Harlan County native Teri Blanton has been one of the most inspiring and fearless activists on the eastern Kentucky coalfield frontlines. While national media attention on mountaintop removal mining has been focused on West Virginia, Blanton often reminds audiences that more than 290 mountains and 574,000 acres of hardwood forests–58 percent of the devastation in central Appalachia–have been blown to bits by reckless mining operations in eastern Kentucky. A long-time fellow and strategist with the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth on clean water, clean energy and coal issues, Blanton most recently took part in the 4-day Kentucky Rising sit-in at the governor’s office in Frankfort, Kentucky, calling for an immediate end to mountaintop removal.

via www.alternet.org

Reece: "Coal industry 'gift' cost UK a celebration"

Last week at the White House, President Barack Obama awarded Kentucky author Wendell Berry the National Humanities Medal.

Last week on the campus of the University of Kentucky, work began in earnest on the Wildcat Coal Lodge.

Because of the latter, UK can claim no institutional pride in the former. And that is sad.

Because President Lee T. Todd Jr. and the UK Board of Trustees agreed to insert the word "coal" into the name of the new men's basketball dorm, in exchange for $7 million from a group of coal operators, Berry announced last summer that he was withdrawing his papers from UK and severing all ties with the university.

via www.kentucky.com

"PSC Approves EKPC Request To Cancel Power Plant"

The Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC) on Monday approved the cancellation of a power plant that East Kentucky Power Cooperative, Inc. (EKPC) had begun constructing in Clark County.

In a related case, the PSC also permitted EKPC to establish a regulatory asset for consideration of future recovery through rates of the $157.4 million that it has already spent on the plant. EKPC will attempt to sell or put to other use the plant components and materials that it has already purchased, thus reducing the amount it will seek to recover through rates.

Both the plant cancellation and the establishment of the regulatory asset are addressed in a settlement reached by EKPC with other parties to the proceedings. They include the Kentucky Office of Attorney General, Gallatin Steel Co., and Wendell Berry, John Patterson and John Rausch, who are member-customers of rural electric cooperatives in the EKPC system.

via www.lex18.com

Another p.o.v.: "Compromise valuable in mountaintop mining debate"

At issue | Various articles, columns and editorials on recent protests against mountaintop removal mining.

"How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing." — Wendell Berry farmer, writer, activist, poet

...the poet must not avert his eyes" — Werner Herzog

Something about what is happening to the coal-bearing Appalachian Mountains is making me very angry.

Something about the title of Wendell Berry's essay "Compromise, Hell!" makes me very angry, too.

via www.kentucky.com

More on Frankfort Sit-in to End Mountaintop Removal Mining

Feb. 25, 2011 —     They went into the governor’s office on a Friday afternoon as concerned citizen-activists. They emerged the following Monday as “Kentucky Rising.”

    That’s the name of a group of citizens who are committed to ending the practice of surface mining better known by many as mountaintop removal. Morehead State University Professor John Hennen was among 14 persons who traveled to Frankfort on Feb. 11 and staged a three-day sit-in at Gov. Steve Beshear’s office.

    “We came out with an identity that we did not have going in,” Hennen said.

via themoreheadnews.com

Wendell Berry interviewed on "Living on Earth: The Costs of Coal"

GELLERMAN: So why did you occupy the office of the Governor of Kentucky?

BERRY: Because the issue is very large and very urgent: that is, the destruction of the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, by surface mining at its most violent, which is to say - mountaintop removal.

GELLERMAN: Well, what did you want the Governor to do about it?

BERRY: You have to understand - our complaint is in the context of a virtual dead-silence for many years on the part of state government. We have done everything we could think of to get a hearing - without any effect whatsoever. So this was simply the next thing if we were going to continue our opposition to those mining practices.

via www.loe.org

An interview: "Sitting In with Wendell Berry to End Mountaintop Removal"

Midway through the historic sit-in, author Jeff Biggers—the grandson of a coal miner and a vocal critic of mountaintop removal—spoke to Wendell Berry about his goals for the sit-in and the importance of civil disobedience.

---

Jeff Biggers: Can you summarize what you’ve been doing here for the last several days?

Wendell Berry: What we’ve done is follow up on a visit we made to the governor’s office last May. On that visit, we talked to the governor and, in effect, it was to no effect. We didn’t cause any thought to happen. It was an unsatisfactory conversation. We didn’t really speak to each other; we didn’t really hear each other. We didn’t talk back and forth on the same question—as you have to do in a real conversation.

via www.yesmagazine.org

"Wendell Berry statement February 14, 2011"

Delivered at I LOVE MOUNTAINS DAY on behalf of those who spent the weekend in the capitol.

Several of us gathered at our governor’s office on Friday, determined to secure for the land and the people of the coal fields, and for the water drinkers downstream, the full attention, long delayed, of the Governor, of state government, and of our fellow citizens.  We came because the land, its forests, and its streams are being destroyed by the surface mining of coal, because the people are suffering intolerable harms to their homes, their health, and their communities, and because all the people downstream are threatened by the degradation and contamination of the rivers.

We have remained here until today because of desires that we know are shared by many thousands of the good people of our state and nation — desires that ought in reason and in justice to be shared by our elected representatives here in Frankfort: namely, that all of our home places should be healthy, that all of our headwater slopes should be safeguarded for us and our children forever by sustainably used and ever-cherished native forests, that every stream should run clear, that every child should breathe clean air, that the economy of every community should grow from the local soil and local resources, within the affection and care, by the skills, thrift, and intelligence of the local people.

The events of the past weekend have been widely noticed, have become “news,” carried evidently all over the nation.  Now we want to say to all of you, who are here in love for the mountains and in protest against their destruction, that we do not look upon these events as finished.  We do not think of what we have done as in any sense a symbolic gesture.  We are humbled, instead, by the realization that our effort cannot be carried to success by us, or by any other few of us.  If the adventure of the last few days, by this small company of friends, is to be more than a symbolic gesture, that can be only because all of you who are here, and many of our friends who are not here, will take it up, make it your adventure and your cause, until this great house will become the true home of justice to all the people of this state, and of faithful care for the divine gifts of land and water, and of life itself. 

via www.kftc.org

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Wendell Berry speaks at I Love Mountains Day rally